The Decemberists are all growns up. In the 2 and a half years since I last saw them at the packed but tiny Jackpot Saloon they’ve now gone on to be able to completely fill the Uptown Theatre, a venue probably 20 times the size of the Jackpot. It’s clearly no accident though, as they proved with their awesome performance last night. For a band with such bookish tendencies, they sure know how to get the people moving. Colin was in great form, engaging the crowd and keeping things lively while practically mugging for the sea of digital cameras (all while jokingly complaining about their eventual appearance on Flickr and YouTube). They played a great set (almost 2 hours long) which started out with a surprise, opening with “Oceanside” from their first EP. Most of the set was from The Crane Wife, with no complaints here since that’s their best album since Castaways and Cutouts I think. There were a couple songs I really wanted to see that they didn’t do, like “The Sporting Life” and “Grace Cathedral Hill” but that’s just the way it goes. At the end of “Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect” (probably my favorite song of theirs) they revealed the secret of its origin, segueing seamlessly into a few bars of the chorus of “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac (wish I’d kept recording to get that bit). We even got a Morrissey cover (”Everyday is Like Sunday“) during the encore, appropriately enough since we’ll be seeing Morrissey at the same place next month. Despite being in the balcony it was still a captivating show, and I still managed to get a few decent photos and videos (though I’m kicking myself for not getting the great crowd interaction during “16 Military Wives”)
Monthly Archive for April, 2007
One of the reasons I wanted to be sure to get a GPS that supported a data connection was that once you can get the data about where you’ve been off of the GPS there’s all kinds of cool stuff you can do with it. Of course, Garmin doesn’t go out of their way to provide any software for getting to the good stuff but fortunately there are several other options. EasyGPS has worked well for me so far. It handles transferring waypoints and track logs to and from the device easily, saves using the widely recognized .gpx format and it’s free. The gpx format is just XML and it’s a pretty straightforward schema so there are already lots of other tools/apps that recognize it and it’s also pretty easy to transform for other uses. The first thing that I’ve found to do with it is to convert it to kml, the file format supported by Google Earth. There’s a handy online app for converting .gpx to .kml or you could just do it with some XSL. Google Earth can also import the data directly from some GPS devices, but that’s only supported in the paid version. I used the web app to get the path from our geocaching trip into Google Earth, which is shown in the picture. Here’s the kmz file if you want to be able to view it in Google Earth yourself. That’s just one of the things you can do with the GPS logs, I’ve got a couple other things that I’m hoping to try out as well for another time.
For the past couple of years every so often Jolayne and I would talk about trying out geocaching, but we just never got around to it. This was primarily due to my indecisiveness about picking out a GPS device, pretty much a necessity for the activity (barring a superhuman sense of smell I suppose). I didn’t want to get a low end GPS to use just for geocaching since we’d probably want to get something more geared toward auto navigation at some point anyway. However, those always seemed just too expensive to justify if the main thing they’d be used for was geocaching. So, a couple weeks ago I came to my senses and realized that at this rate we’d finally go geocaching when we were senior citizens and I ordered a Garmin eTrex Legend. It had good reviews and seemed to be a good choice in the middle of the low-end devices with a few more features than the bare minimum without being much more expensive. Plus it came with a data cable which was great since one of the things I really wanted to be able to do was to pull the GPS track logs off of it (I’ll have to do another post about the cool stuff you can do with those).
Since the weather finally got more spring-like today we decided to go out and try to find our first cache, one that was in the Parkville Nature Sanctuary. It seemed like a good choice to start out with since it’s only a couple miles from our house and it’s got some nice, short, not too challenging trails. However, it probably would have been good to check the trail map against the location of the cache first to pick the right trail to start out on. I just kind of picked a trail that I thought would get us to where the GPS was telling us to go, only to realize when we got to the top of a hill that the trail wouldn’t connect to the part of the nature sanctuary that we needed to get to. Oops. After a minor off trail course correction down the side of a hill, across a small creek, and half way up another hill we made it to the waypoint for the cache. After a few minutes of searching, Jolayne discovered it hidden under a tree branch and we opened it up to check out the contents and sign the log book. Our trip back was a lot easier since we took the right trail that would have lead us almost right to the cache in the first place. We had a good time, and there are ton of other caches in the Kansas City area so I’m sure we’ll be out doing it again some time soon.
Yo La Tengo is now 2 for 2 in the category of shows I have seen which rocked above and beyond the call of duty. It’s always a pleasure to see them live, mostly for the simple fact that you can easily tell that they love the music and that making it comes so naturally to them. You just can’t watch Ira pummeling out such impressive layers of sound without thinking “Hey, there’s a guy that really enjoys what he’s doing.”
Listening to Yo La Tengo albums, I typically gravitate more towards the mellower tracks, so whenever I see them live it’s always kind of a shift to remember that they do rock out, and quite frequently. Their live shows add so much more to their noisier tracks . Songs that may not have seemed quite as compelling on the album become spellbinding squeedly guitar maelstroms when they play them live. For example, they stuck a good several minutes of guitar freakout into the middle of their version of “Little Honda”, and that’s a Beach Boys song fer crying out loud.
The set list was pretty heavily focused on their most recent album, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, naturally. As great as that album is, I kind of missed the more expansive list they played last time I saw them when they weren’t touring on a new album. They worked in several songs from Fakebook, which was great but I was definitely surprised that they didn’t play “Cherry Chapstick”, “Sugarcube”, or “You Can Have It All”. Acoustic versions of “Tom Courtenay” and “Autumn Sweater” (video) helped balance that out though. At first I was a little disappointed that they didn’t close with “Blue Line Swinger”, which they did an awesome 15 minute version of to close last time they were in town but after the last ringing echoes of the blissful fuzz of “The Story of Yo La Tango” died out I realized that it was just as good, if not better.
not sure how well this is going to work but what the hey i’ve got some time to kill. currently waiting for the show to start and since jolayne has enough common sense not to go out on a weeknight i’m all alone. so here i am, painfully typing away on a cell phone keypad. i was thinking of going for macworld style webcast updates, but man this sucks. forget this, i think i need a Palm.
Unsurprisingly, the Neko Case concert on Friday night was sold out and completely packed. Liberty Hall is one of the larger venues in Lawrence and I’d imagine even someplace larger like the Granada probably would have sold out as well. With good reason too, as it turns out her voice is every bit as impressive and powerful live as it is on her albums, if not more so.
The opening act was actually primarily composed of members of her touring band, including Jon Rauhouse and Kelly Hogan, playing a selection of Americana like “Prisoner of Love” and a version of the Perry Mason theme song. They’re definitely a talented group of musicians and put on a great show the entire evening, both in the opening and with Neko Case.
Whenever you see a show by someone who has so many great songs on quite a few albums you always go in knowing that there’ll probably be more than a few songs that you really wanted to see that they won’t do. It’d just be impossible, unless it were a 3 hour show or something. In this case though, I lucked out and the set list was pretty much perfect from the beginning (”Things That Scare Me”) to the second encore (”Knock Loud”). There were even a few songs where she mentioned that it was one that they didn’t do that often and it turned out to be something that I’d really been hoping they’d play. Jolayne and I both had an awesome time and hopefully it won’t be too long before she plays around here again. I was also able to get some photos and a couple videos as well. I’ve only got the one below online so far but I’ll be adding the others soon.
Elsewhere